


Not Marble, nor the Gilded Monuments

by crinklefries



Series: all days are nights [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Image, Body Worship, Bucky has unkind thoughts about himself, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Crossdressing, Domestic Fluff, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Lingerie, M/M, Makeup, Mentions of dissociation, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovery, Romance, Romantic Fluff, Self-Acceptance, Sexual Content, Touch-Starved, a fic as soft as cotton, body acceptance, make up and lingerie as self expression and self exploration, the unbearable lightness of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:29:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21676060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinklefries/pseuds/crinklefries
Summary: It’s no less than he deserves, but it doesn’t make it any easier, every time he looks in a mirror and sees the Asset staring back.When Steve turns him around, he shakes, afraid for a brief, bright moment that none of it will have made any difference; that he will look for humanity and still find a monster in return. But Steve stands by him and he is reminded that Steve is brave every day. So for him, Bucky can be brave too; he thinks, he will never earn any grace by being a coward.Bucky looks up and meets his own eyes.*A story of how Bucky Barnes learns to love himself again and how Steve shows him the way.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: all days are nights [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1562362
Comments: 63
Kudos: 559
Collections: Sweet and Gentle Steve/Bucky





	Not Marble, nor the Gilded Monuments

**Author's Note:**

> Sometime in June, deisderium and I had an idea to write a pair of fics that paralleled each other in some way, but were not technically related. What resulted was two fics about love, healing, and self exploration through soft, luxurious things--lingerie, silk, make up, fashion--unconventional to the characters who need them. We call this the _all days are nights_ series. 
> 
> The two fics are sister fics, one set pre-war and one set post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier. You do not need to read both fic together or separately. They do not have to exist in the same universe, unless you want them to. I, personally, like to think both could have happened. :) 
> 
> Whether you read one or both fics, I hope you enjoy this soft story about how Bucky learns to love himself and how Steve has loved him all along.

*

he touches you,  
like a prayer for which no words exist,  
and you feel your heart taking root in your body,  
like you’ve discovered something you  
don’t even have a name for  
— _You are Jeff_ , 24, Richard Siken

*

He drags him onto the banks of the Potomac, eyes closed, suit waterlogged. He’s heavier than he looks; that much he registers. He looks down at him, pale and unmoving. His hair is wet, stuck to the sides of his forehead. There’s a dark red spreading across his sides, the color staining the dark blue of his chest. There’s blood smeared near his mouth.

The Asset isn’t used to noticing. He’s even less used to caring, but this, he can’t shake. His head is full of cotton and blaring static. He’s acutely aware of his body; cold and wet, hard and unforgiving.

He kneels next to him and presses a hand to his chest—the one made of flesh and bone. He presses the same hand to his throat.

A pulse there—not strong, but beating.

He’s alive.

The Soldier swallows the static and stands.

He leaves the Captain at the side of the river and disappears.

  
He isn’t found again until he wants to be.

*

“Bucky?” Steve’s voice echoes around the apartment.

He shucks off his boots at the door and hangs the shield on its slot beside the coat rack. His skin is slick with sweat, his hair plastered to the side of his neck. He knows villains can’t work on a schedule, but he has more than a passing wish they would wait for another season. The New York City summer humidity is stifling enough without him having to tromp around Manhattan inside a thick suit. He had asked Tony for more breathable material during the last upgrade, but apparently cotton is discouraged for superheroes.

Steve pads down the hallway, listening for the slightest indication of sound. The kitchen is empty and so is the living room. There seems to be no sound from the bedroom and the bathroom is silent too. He stops, barefoot, outside the door to the study.

There’s a window open here—he hears the quiet evening noises of Park Slope filter in through the opening.

“Hey,” Steve says, knocking gently and opening the door a moment later. “I’m home.”

There’s no answer to him, although he didn’t really think there would be.

The back of Bucky’s familiar brown head greets him from behind the computer desk.

Steve’s chest lightens at the sight of him. He pads forward, braces a hand to the top of Bucky’s metal shoulder, and drops a kiss down onto the crest of his head.

“Hey,” he says.

Steve doesn’t know how long Bucky has been staring ahead, but the lines of his shoulders tell him he hasn’t moved recently. It always takes him some time to process. Before, he would wait a minute, even two, for Bucky to acknowledge his presence. Lately, it’s been less than that—a handful of moments while Bucky’s brain stops disassociating and Steve’s touch brings him back online.

It’s no different today, although Steve is pleasantly surprised to not have to wait too long before he feels shoulder muscles move under his palms.

“Steve?” Bucky asks and tilts his head back.

Steve looks over Bucky’s features, blank from whatever he’s been concentrating on, but soft from it too. Whenever Bucky fixates on something, he loses the reserves of emotion he has—the pent up lines of anger, the chasm of hurt—for something a bit like a clean slate. Steve can’t begrudge him that—not after everything he’s been through.

Steve has watched Bucky every way it’s possible to watch him, since he found him again, that day in Bucharest. It’s never enough; the hunger claws at him every time. He’s overwhelmed with—not just affection, but something deeper and more visceral. If he thinks about it too long, it’s just enough to swallow him, so he doesn’t. Instead, he lays a thumb at Bucky’s jaw and thinks about how much he loves him instead. The smile that Steve can’t help, not because Bucky is smiling at him—he isn’t—but because Bucky is here, in his arms, for him to protect.

He leans forward and Bucky tips his head back farther and they entangle in a soft, chaste, upside down kiss.

“You’re in your head today,” Steve says, with a smile. “Everything okay?”

Bucky blinks at him and then nods.

“Everything’s okay,” he says.

Steve rubs a circle into Bucky’s flesh shoulder with his thumb.

“What are you working on?” he asks.

He’ll come home—from missions, from routine days at SHIELD, from the gym—and every day is a little different. Bucky is trying to adjust to being a human again and that means a variety of things. Sometimes, Steve will find him puzzling over ingredients in the kitchen. Other times, he’ll be watching TV, intently. Once, Steve came home to find Bucky had climbed out the fire escape onto the roof of their Brooklyn apartment and had somehow started a small garden in the time between Steve leaving in the morning and returning at night.

Steve doesn’t stifle anything Bucky tries to do, of course. Bucky could tell him he wants to learn taxidermy and shove a dead animal into Steve’s chest and Steve would hide his revulsion and say okay, let’s Google it.

Bucky pauses for a moment.

“Nothing,” he says, after a beat too long.

Sometimes, Steve will find him like this too—doing something or discovering something he doesn’t want to share. It makes Steve curious, but he doesn’t press. If anyone has earned his harmless secrets, it’s Bucky.

“Okay,” Steve says and leans forward to kiss him again. “I’m going to make dinner. Lasagna sound okay?”

Bucky stares at him, upside down, and after a moment of processing, nods. A smile creeps to the corners of his mouth and Steve feels it resonate, in all of the corners of his chest.

“I like lasagna,” Bucky says.

Steve scratches lightly at his scalp.

“Do you want to help?” he asks.

After another moment, Bucky nods.

“Okay,” Steve says and kisses his forehead. “Meet me in the kitchen.”

  
Bucky does well with routine. He does even better with rhythmic actions—tasks he can repeat carefully until he’s lost himself to the motion of it. Cooking is wonderful for him. They discover this shortly after Steve brings him back home. It’s a cold New York City winter day, not unlike the ones they shivered through when they were younger, only with added central heating. The apartment is drafty and Bucky’s face feels cold to the touch, so Steve decides to make a hearty beef stew to fill their stomachs.

Bucky, who is still quiet and skittish at the time, comes up behind him. Steve turns to him as he’s chopping vegetables for the stew.

Steve has known Bucky his entire life, so it takes only a few moments of assessing the silence to decide there’s something Bucky wants to say or do that he feels he needs to ask permission for.

Steve’s hands slow and he watches Bucky’s eyes flicker from the cutting board to Steve and back again. When it clicks, it loosens something tight in his chest.

“Do you want to chop?” Steve asks gently. “I’ll prepare the beef.”

Bucky stares at him for one intense, discomfiting moment. Then he nods.

They trade places. Steve starts rinsing and seasoning the beef. A minute later he hears the hesitant noises of the knife thudding against the chopping board. It’s slow at first and then it picks up. The noise becomes steadier and steadier until Steve stops browning the beef to turn to watch.

Bucky, quietly chopping carrots and onions and peppers at the chopping board, his eyes focused, his hand steady, smiles.

It’s the first time Steve sees him smile since Bucharest.

  
They develop a routine, slowly. Steve comes home and hangs his shield at the door. He asks Bucky if he wants to help him with dinner. Bucky slowly disentangles himself from whatever it is he’s doing and nods. Steve begins setting up in the kitchen first, but Bucky always joins him soon after. At first, Steve tells Bucky what it is he needs him to do. But then, Bucky starts to do things himself, first without being told, and then without being asked.

Now, Steve will start their dinner and Bucky will help along the way. They learn to anticipate one another’s needs. They learn to exist, first, in a space together and then, make that space their home.

  
Steve adds the onions and garlic to the pan and waits for them to cook before adding the seasoned meat. Bucky opens the can of tomato paste and crushed tomatoes. He boils water and adds the pasta to it. He mixes the eggs and ricotta and seasonings.

They work mostly in silence, although halfway through, Steve lets the meat simmer while he goes to the living room and selects a record to put on the record player. Johnny Cash plays lightly in the background as he returns to the kitchen to watch Bucky begin to prepare the baking dish.

“Hey,” Steve says with a smile.

Bucky looks up questioningly and Steve’s smile widens. He taps a finger to his mouth and Bucky makes a slight face. But then he leans forward and gives Steve a kiss.

“It smells good,” Steve says. “I think it’s ready to assemble.”

  
They assemble the lasagna together—layering cooked noodle with the cheese mixture with the meat and sauce mixture and back to the noodle. At the end, Steve lets Bucky dump all of the extra cheese on top. Bucky grins wickedly and Steve laughs.

Steve pours them both a glass of wine and they wait for it to cook, one neat foot apart on the couch.

*

Bucky doesn’t remember everything about being the Winter Soldier. Part of that is the sheer psychological and physiological after effects of decades of torture. Part of that is a defense mechanism. At least part of it is that after a while, every Nazi starts blending together.

When Steve finds him in Bucharest, he’s trying to rewire himself back into half a human being. He reads pamphlets on the Internet, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. He has a metal arm where a real one should be, he’s missing half of his memories, he seems hard-wired to deal with every inconsequential problem with murder, and he hasn’t had a real appetite in over thirty years. Every night he wakes up screaming from nightmares and every day his brain tries to short circuit. He doesn’t want the horror of being wiped clean, but he craves the peace that comes with being a blank slate. If he can’t remember, then he can’t think, and if he can’t think, then he can’t look down at his hands and see the phantom blood caked under his fingernails.

Steve finds him like this—a bag of plums in his hands, a diary full of notes from the Smithsonian, and a mattress on the floor of a one bedroom Romanian flat with candy wrappers strewn about the box he uses for a side table. He’s starting to remember who he is, but he still doesn’t know what he likes.

Steve puts a hand on his shoulder and when Bucky doesn’t try to shoot his face off, he pulls him into a hug.

It ruins everything.

Bucky’s entire brain _screams_ at the contact. He hasn’t been the Asset in nearly two years, but it comes hurtling back to him—every time he has been touched, in over seventy years, has come at the cost of his freedom. He hasn’t known a kind caress, a meaningful embrace, in decades. Touch, to him, in the briars of his mind, is violence.

He _screams_ and Steve lets go of him, stunned, and stumbles back.

Bucky holds the sides of his head and crouches to his knees and Steve looks so full of anguish that Bucky screams again.

It takes them ten minutes to calm him down, his heart racing so rapidly he can feel it clattering into his teeth. His vision spots in and out, his brain grows hazy. His limbs, they shake.

When he comes back into himself, he hasn’t killed anyone, but Steve is hovering, a full foot away from him.

They learn, with time, that is as much as Bucky will allow.

  
It’s a negotiation—the distance between them. Bucky learns to be okay with some things—Steve’s hand on his shoulder, Steve’s fingers carefully on his jaws. It’s not immediate, but he lets Steve stand closer to him, when he’s feeling stable and when he’s feeling loose. The first time Steve kisses him, Bucky freezes—his entire body going still. But that’s a different kind of touch and when he realizes it comes at the expense of nothing, he gasps and sinks into it.

He likes kisses after that.

But some negotiations take time. Steve kisses him on his mouth and Bucky kisses him back. But when they’re on the couch, sitting side by side, he needs one foot of space.

  
Once, he had known how to kiss. He doesn’t remember everything, but he remembers this. Once, touch to him was as easy as breathing. He remembers a hand spread across the small of a back, his fingers pulling on tight curls and springing them loose, fingertips tracing the curves of a chest, pressing into the divots in between ribs, that dip where the stomach sinks into the navel. He remembers shoulders pressed against his own, sitting knee to knee, across from someone at a tiny kitchen table in a tiny apartment, so small he couldn’t help but touch. He shares a bed, wrapping himself from behind him, arms slung over a bony hip, a back flush against his chest. He remembers nudging his nose into the soft, golden bristles at the back of a soft, golden neck. He remembers it to be Steve and that, at least, sets his heart clattering in his chest, or whatever’s left of it.

He doesn’t remember kissing Steve, but that’s not to say he didn’t. He does remember kissing others though—dames and gentlemen and everyone in between. Once, Bucky had been known for kissing, had given his kisses out like chocolates on Halloween. He had been generous with them and his partners had been generous back.

Once, he had touched as easily as he had breathed and when someone touched him in return, it would light up at the base of his spine, the synapses sparking into connection up and down his back.

That had been before touch had been turned against him—not something to lay softly on his wrist, but something colder, gunmetal in his palms, casing around his head. He has bruises that have faded with time, but that have littered him everywhere inside.

Now touch is something he has a complicated relationship with.

Steve tells him that it makes sense—that it’s okay to want distance, but he doesn’t think it makes sense and he doesn’t want it. He needs it, and there’s a difference there.

Some touches make him grit his teeth in phantom pains and others make his fear flare to life. Once, Steve accidentally brushes his elbow and Bucky has his hand around Steve’s throat before he realizes. He lets Steve go and Steve apologizes and Bucky feels a sob build that he swallows because he remembers not being a broken machine once, but that had been when he had been human.

He doesn’t think he’s been human in a very long time.

He tells Steve this, one time, on a bad day when he has the sweats and he’s grinding his teeth. Steve sits next to him on the couch, one foot away, and Bucky sits, rigid and shaking.

“Some days,” he grits out. “I don’t feel human at all.”

Steve softens at that. He always softens at Bucky, no matter what he says or does. Steve is Captain America to everyone else because everyone else needs him to be. Bucky doesn’t know what he needs from Steve, but Steve intuits it somehow, anyway. He leaves his shield at the door, lays his anger down on the doormat and steps into their home. His expression is as soft as his touch, when Bucky allows them of him.

“Why not?” Steve asks.

Sometimes he asks questions just to have Bucky think them out loud. Most days Bucky hates this. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t need it.

“Humans don’t act like this, Steve,” he says, each word costing him something. “Humans don’t. Malfunction.”

“Humans malfunction all the time, Buck,” Steve says and Bucky can hear the gentle smile in his voice. “That’s the only real part of being human.”

Bucky opens his eyes. He hadn’t realized he’d closed them.

Steve looks at him and taps his mouth.

Even like this, sweating and straining against the violence of his own mind, Bucky responds. He leans forward and kisses Steve. Steve places two fingers on Bucky’s jaw—just his index finger and his thumb. It dislodges something in Bucky’s chest. Some touches make his skin feel like it’s on fire, but not this. Kissing Steve makes him feel safe.

Bucky hasn’t felt safe in a very long time.

“There,” Steve says, pulling back just enough to look Bucky in the eyes. “That’s the most human thing of all.”

  
Steve encourages Bucky to see someone, twice a week. He doesn’t force him to, because Steve never forces Bucky to do anything, but he encourages him. Bucky can’t get the shrieking out of his head for the first six months after he’s brought home. Every time he steps out of the apartment he feels shredded, afraid of the ground below his feet and angry at the sky above him. He exists in the nest Steve makes for them and Steve never says a word about it. That seventh month, Steve kisses him for the first time. Bucky decides he can try to leave the house after that.

The therapist is somewhat of a hack, but he supposes no one specializes in fucked up, off-brand supersoldiers with depression, PTSD, paranoia, and some degree of agoraphobia. The therapist is kind to him, mostly, and sits with him in silence when he needs it and asks him questions when he’s not grinding his words.

The therapist tells him he’s touch starved.

Bucky didn’t need a therapist to tell him that.

“Touch is complicated,” he tells her one day.

“That’s okay,” she says, giving him a patient, kind smile. “Touch is complicated for everyone.”

It’s the most helpful thing anyone has said to him.

“How do I,” Bucky asks, making his mouth and voice as small as possible, “uncomplicate. It.”

The therapist taps a pen to her mouth.

“Find out what you like,” she says. “Find out what makes you feel good.”

“Just that?” Bucky swallows. “Just, good?”

“It’s a good reason, James,” the therapist says. “It’s human to want to feel good.”

Bucky stares down at his hands—one rough, calloused, but flesh and the other cold, unfeeling, metal.

He doesn’t know what feels good. But he likes hearing that it’s okay to want it. That it makes him human to want it. It makes him want to try.

Maybe the therapist isn’t a complete hack, he decides.

*

Steve has to go on a mission. Bucky never asks for details of why he goes or what he does there, but he does ask for two things—where, so he knows where to look for Steve if something goes wrong, and when, so he knows when to expect him back. Every time Steve leaves, he presses a kiss to Bucky’s temple, after asking him if it’s okay. He tells him where he’s going and when he’s going to come back. He tells Bucky that he loves him. The warmth of his mouth lingers, long after he’s left.

This time, it’s Serbia.

“Belgrade,” Steve tells him, his shield already on his back. “Three days. If we get delayed, I’ll have JARVIS call you.”

“Three days,” Bucky repeats. He has his fists balled to the side of him. He takes a breath through his nose and nods.

“Is it okay?” Steve asks and Bucky assesses how he feels today.

Today, Bucky feels—almost needy. He wants to press his face against Steve’s shoulder, wrap his arms around his waist, and grind into him, head to toe. He wants Steve to hold him and stroke his back until Bucky becomes soft and pliant in his arms.

Bucky would ask for it if he knew his body would allow him to have it. He knows Steve would drop his shield and take him into his arms before he finished asking.

He wishes he could reconcile what he knows he wants with what he knows he can handle.

He nods, even though he’s a little terse.

“It’s okay,” Bucky says.

Steve gives him that soft smile Bucky tucks away in the recesses of his mind, collecting the soft edges for him to remember in secret.

Steve leans forward and presses a warm kiss to Bucky’s temple. He has a careful hand to Bucky’s jaw. He lingers only until Bucky tenses, then he backs off.

“I love you,” Steve says, softly.

Bucky never says it back. It feels wrong to give that to Steve when he can’t give him anything else. He nods instead and Steve smiles.

“Three days,” Steve says.

Then he leaves.

  
That leaves Bucky with three days to himself, in a house that doesn’t feel the same without Steve there. He locks the door and shuts the blinds on all of the windows. Then he makes himself tea with the new electric tea kettle Steve bought for them and plods down the hallway.

He sits down at the computer, worrying at his lower lips. The last time he had looked, Steve had almost caught him. He’s not ashamed, but he doesn’t want to share this. Not yet. But Steve isn’t here now, and he won’t be back for three days.

Bucky puts his cup of tea carefully on a coaster next to the mouse pad. Then, knowing Steve won’t be back to find him, he finds the hidden folder of pictures and opens the first one again.

*

Steve comes back from Belgrade three days later, as promised. He’s tired, the ache in his muscles bone deep and his head fuzzy from lack of sleep. He takes the stairs down from the quinjet three at a time, skirts around Tony’s open mouth, and ignores anyone who tries to utter more than three words to him. SHIELD is destroyed and half of their trusted operatives gone to ground, Nick with them, but that doesn’t mean the missions stop. Maria Hill sits in an office in Stark industries, protected by their legal team, and maps out HYDRA cells that need flushing.

It gives Steve something to do, a way to channel his restless energy, but he’s not sold on living his life this way in perpetuity. The only thing he’s willing to risk it all for he found in a small apartment in Romania; the rest is just details. He opts out of a debrief and gets on his motorcycle, parked in Stark’s garage, waiting for him to get back.

He takes the short route home, the back of his neck buzzing, his fingers itching to find Bucky, to see him where he left him and touch him to make sure he’s still real. Steve does that more than he’s willing to admit to himself and only when Bucky will let him. That’s Steve’s secret, kept close to his chest. Bucky thinks he’s the one with scrambled eggs for brains, but that’s not true. Steve needs to touch Bucky just as much as Bucky needs to feel Steve’s touch on him. He’s just better at hiding it.

He leaves his motorcycle outside and his mantle at the steps. He hangs the shield in its place next to the coat rack and goes inside.

  
The apartment is quiet, the air untouched in a way that makes the hair stand up on the back of Steve’s neck. He moves through quietly, his body large and unwieldy, but his footsteps soft. He opens doors and looks inside and when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, his heart rate ticks up, slow at first and then faster. Bucky isn’t in the kitchen or the living room. He isn’t in the bathroom or the study. Steve opens the door to Bucky’s bedroom and finds the room empty, the bed untouched.

His breath catches in his chest then, tight and worried, an unshakeable fear that winds slowly through his limbs, weighing him like an anchor until he’s rooted nearly statue still to the ground. He swallows his panic roughly. Steve’s hand shakes as he opens the door to his bedroom.

He exhales when he sees Bucky, curled up on his bed.

Steve doesn’t cross to him, sink to the ground next to his bed and take Bucky’s face in his hands, but the impulse shakes through him. Bucky lays on his side, his hair loose around his shoulders, brown hair with the faintest hint of a curl sliding across his face. Steve knows Bucky doesn’t sleep much and he certainly doesn’t sleep well. It catches in that sore spot under his ribs, the way he sleeps now, quiet and undisturbed, as though he’s found some measure of peace, here in Steve’s bed.

The tight, sharp feeling in his chest loosens. Steve breathes.

He watches him for a minute anyway, tracing the shape of his face with his eyes, committing the curves and slopes to memory. He swallows the unbearable weight of feeling and turns toward the bathroom.

He has three days of travel and fighting to wash off his skin. He stinks to high heaven of blood and dirt, violence, and gunfire. The why of it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t want to bring that back to Bucky, not when he’s earned his rest. Not when he’s trying so hard to move on.

  
Steve takes his time washing the dirt off, watches it swirl down the drain in the hot, steaming water of the shower. He steps out of the steam and into a clean pair of sweats and a t-shirt, feeling lighter in spirit, if not in limb.

By the time he comes back to the room, Bucky’s shifted on his other side. Careful not to disturb him, Steve lifts a knee onto the other side of the bed and pulling back the covers, slips in.

He stops exactly a foot away, his King-sized bed allowing him his space and Bucky his own. He’s asked Bucky more than once to sleep with him, but Bucky’s said no each time. Steve has never pushed, but he’s repeated the offer. He wants Bucky to know the difference: something offered, something given, nothing forced. Bucky has choices here. What HYDRA took from him, Steve will give him back. He had promised himself that, the day Bucky had sank to his knees and screamed.

His fingers ache to reach forward now and brush back his hair. Steve feels it in him, a bottomless need to touch, to press his fingers against Bucky’s face and trace along the edges, memorizing every inch of skin he’s willing to give. He swallows, feeling the ache in the pit of him. If Bucky let him, Steve would give him anything. If Bucky let him, Steve would worship his body relentlessly, endlessly, without apology.

He knows it’s not that easy and that’s okay too. Steve Rogers has never loved something easy when he could love something hard.

So he doesn’t reach out, but he does watch him. He can see the smudges of dark circles under his eyes, the way his brow is furrowed, just a little wrinkle in between. Bucky’s chest moves up and down slowly, his hair fluttering with each exhale and settling with each inhale. The movement is slight; it makes him seem delicate, all two hundred odd pounds of him.

Bucky snuffles, his nose twitching, and Steve almost laughs. It’s only when he settles back down again, his breath making the edges flutter that Steve notices he’s holding something in his hands. The pages are printed, something colorful on white sheets Steve keeps stocked in the study.

Bucky lets out a light snore and Steve can’t help the affectionate smile that creeps over his face. He can’t help reaching forward either, curiosity getting the better of him. Gently, so gently even Bucky doesn’t notice, Steve pries the papers from his hands.

They go easily enough, Bucky’s hands slack in sleep.

Steve smiles, only barely resisting the urge to kiss him like this. Then, quietly, he looks down at the pages.

It’s not clear to him, at first, what he’s looking at. Then, with surprise, he realizes.

His eyes widen.

*

Bucky doesn’t know how he finds it. He doesn’t leave the apartment and he doesn’t have friends, so it has to be one of Steve’s. It can’t be Sam and Bucky’s not sure Clint knows how to read, so he thinks it must have been the Widow. Natasha. She visits one day, sitting at their kitchen counter, her legs crossed and her nails tapping against the marble top. Steve runs to the corner store to pick up ice cream and Bucky skirts around the corners of the room until Natasha looks up and rolls her eyes. She says something to him in Russian and he answers before he can be sure of what he says. He disappears around the corner and when he re-emerges two hours later, Steve’s left a note for him on the counter saying he and Natasha have to take care of something and that he’ll be back.

Bucky takes the note and saves it in his pocket—he saves all of Steve’s notes. He cleans the kitchen until it’s spotless, just the way he likes it. That’s where he finds it—on the counter, where the Widow—Natasha—had been sitting.

A magazine with a woman in silk on the cover.

  
Bucky doesn’t remember stealing it, but he remembers looking at it. He turns each page carefully, sitting on the floor of the study with his legs crossed. He’s gentle with the gloss, making sure it doesn’t catch in the grooves of his metal fingers. Each page makes his eyes grow a little wider, his heart catch erratically in his chest.

Bucky worries at his lips. He turns a page and pauses. He traces the lips on a woman whose mouth is lined in a bright red. The feeling sinks into his stomach, burning and keen. He doesn’t identify it for what it is until later—hunger, the kind he thinks about when he lays awake at night.

In his head, in loop, is one voice. It isn’t his. It isn’t even Steve’s.

It’s the therapist’s, actually.

She says to him, _Find out what you like. Find out what makes you feel good._

He thinks about that for a long time.

Eventually, the gloss on the pages start to fade.

  
Bucky doesn’t like looking at himself in the mirror. He had discovered this almost immediately after leaving HYDRA. He had washed the dirt and blood off of him in a shitty hotel, three states away, and stripped, standing in front of the floor-length mirror with nothing to hide.

What he had seen had sent screeches through his head. He couldn’t remember the person he was, but he knew what machines looked like. He was still the Asset then, or whatever was left over when the Asset deactivated and before Bucky Barnes was given back his name. He had stood in front of the mirror, shaking, the ropes of scars latticing their way up and down his torso, the thick, raised skin where his ugly metal arm met the top of his shoulder. He was only beginning to feel again, so he didn’t have the word for it then, but the word hasn’t changed since—the feeling hasn’t.

He looks at himself in the mirror and sees hard edges and unforgiving lines. He sees scars marking a body that wasn’t his, rough hands used to kill, ugly parts of an ugly whole that hasn’t been touched kindly in decades and which hasn’t earned any kindness either. That’s the feeling he swallows, every time he sees his body. He is a hard, cold, unforgiving machine. It’s ugly, inside and out.

He quickly puts on his clothes and turns away.

He doesn’t want to see what can’t change.

  
Steve leaves again on an overnight mission, but this time it’s short.

“Nebraska,” he says. “One night.”

Bucky nods and Steve kisses his temple.

“I love you,” Steve says, his hand on Bucky’s jaw.

Bucky aches to keep him home, but Steve leaves through the front door.

  
He’s cleaning again, partly out of anxiety, partly out of boredom. He cleans the kitchen until the cabinets are organized. He cleans the bathroom until he can see his reflection in the tiles. He cleans the bedrooms and straightens the sheets until a quarter could bounce off each bed.

That’s why he’s in Steve’s room, when he sees it.

It’s folded neatly on Steve’s dresser, a bow on top. Bucky hesitates, not knowing who or what it’s for. But boredom has him gravitate forward, or maybe it’s curiosity.

When he touches the silk, he lets out a soft gasp.

It’s a lavender, so light it nearly shimmers in the slight bedroom light.

Bucky looks around nervously, as though Steve might appear and stop him.

When he doesn’t magically pop around the corner, Bucky sucks in his breath and touches it again.

It’s soft, cool and slick against his fingertips. He runs his fingers down the square carefully. he strokes it carefully, even delicately, his heart beating in rhythm with the sensation. Then, a little nervous, he puts the bow to the side and picks it up even more carefully, gently unfolding the silk. The bottom brushes against his knees, the belt hanging softly by its side. Bucky doesn’t know who it’s for, but he knows it’s too large for any woman Steve knows.

He swallows, an ache building in the pit of his stomach. This is both new and old. He’s slept with it ever since he pilfered Natasha’s magazine. It’s hunger, he recognizes. It’s want.

Shaking, slightly, Bucky puts one arm through and then the other. He slides it over his shoulders and, hesitantly, steps in front of a mirror.

The silk robe is lovely, the lavender color soft, a simple contrast to how hard and mangled he feels inside. It feels like butter against his skin, the whisper of it sliding over parts of him that have never felt such softness, nor such luxury. Bucky closes the robe at the front, roping the belt around his waist.

He feels a thrill run through him, a sharp feeling that starts in his chest and pierces through him so acutely that he gasps at the sensation. He looks at his reflection and finds his mouth open, his expression soft around the eyes. He looks like he’s in awe, entranced by his reflection. It’s to his liking—or as much to his liking as he will ever find it.

The silk robe sits smoothly against his lines and gives him a slight curve, the belt accentuating how narrow his waist actually is. Buck presses a hand over the front, sliding his calloused palm down the feather-light cloth. He heart beats rapidly against his clavicle.

He doesn’t know this feeling exactly, couldn’t put a word to it. But it’s light, pressing against his rib cage and expanding. He peeks at his reflection again and he smiles back.

He stands in front of the mirror for a long time, watching his reflection watching him. He holds the robe close to him, buries his face in its folds. He feels it all over, the spark skittering across every part of him.

Bucky takes the silk robe from Steve’s room, leaving the bow on his dresser.

  
When Steve comes back, Bucky doesn’t say anything and Steve doesn’t ask.

Still, he keeps it folded neatly, hidden in the drawer he keeps all of his treasures.

Sometimes, at night, when he can’t sleep, he gets it out and slides it back over his shoulders.

*

Steve doesn’t say anything about it. He comes home to find the robe gone and he fingers the bow, smiles and pockets it.

The next day, Bucky won’t look him in the eyes, but he smiles when he thinks Steve’s not looking. It’s funny to Steve, that Bucky thinks he’s ever not looking.

There’s no discernible difference, but there doesn’t have to be. Steve doesn’t want to change Bucky. He just wants to make him happy.

At the end of the day he’ll do anything, buy him anything, to get just one smile and one touch from the person he loves. What Bucky does in between—that’s his to have and Steve’s fine with that.

  
Bucky never wears the robe in front of him, but that’s okay. Steve is happy to let him have his secrets. That doesn’t mean he won’t indulge him.

He does his own research online and buys a magazine. It’s nothing explicit or erotic. It’s a magazine about lingerie by women, for women. Steve doesn’t know that Bucky cares, but if he does he can try to find something different. Surely there are men out there who also consume this content. Steve’s never been to a drag or burlesque show, but it’s not out of any sense of propriety.

He remembers the neighborhoods from the 40s, the men with the slim shoulders and the jutting collarbones, rouge on their lips that was just noticeable if someone cared to notice it. Queer people have always existed, have always found a way to live and love, in the shadows, in the light, in whatever space they can catch for themselves. It’s never bothered Steve. Hell, Steve could have danced himself if things had gotten bad enough before the war. He had certainly had the bird-like frame more than a few gentlemen preferred.

Steve leaves the magazine on the coffee table one day before leaving for Avengers duties. He doesn’t know if Bucky will take it, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

When he comes home, the magazine is gone. Bucky is quiet that night, but not in a bad way. When Steve kisses him, he seems contemplative, instead.

  
He tries a different magazine next time, something a little less proper. It’s not raunchy, but the lingerie has a bit more lace, some more straps.

This magazine, too, disappears, but something changes.

This time, when Steve gets back from a two day mission, Bucky’s asleep in his room. But on the kitchen counter is a single, glossy page. On the page is a corset.

*

Bucky sits on the edge of his bed, hands clasped together on his lap. It looks like he’s praying, which would be funny in an irreverent kind of way, but then again maybe he is, in his own way.

His head buzzes faintly, that quiet crackle that fills the back of his mind when he sits still. He doesn’t know if he likes the static, but it’s better than the violence. Some days Bucky screams in his sleep because it’s screaming in his head. There’s a high pitched, shrieking sound that reverberates around his skull on his bad days, like all of the people he’s killed are alive in his mind. Why shouldn’t they? He tells the therapist once. It’s the only place Bucky’s left them alive.

This isn’t that kind of a day. He hasn’t had that kind of a day in a while.

Steve is—out. Bucky’s not entirely sure where, only that it’s somewhere in the city and it’s not any place for any period of time that he needs to keep track of. Sometimes Bucky likes to know anyway. Sometimes he feels crazy, like embedding a tracker into Steve’s skin wouldn’t be enough to keep him safe. He wonders that too, sometimes, if swallowing Steve would be enough to make him feel sane again. Every time Steve leaves, Bucky feels an ache to the core of him, as though losing him would be the end of everything he is, which is funny because Bucky had tried to kill him not three years ago.

Anyway, on his worst days he’s paralyzed with fear. Today, he’s just a little listless, missing Steve even though he’s just stepped out on an errand.

He runs one thumb over the knuckles of the other hand, the stroke gentle and rhythmic. He likes rhythm, he decides, the soothing melody of the same motion calming something that’s always beating just erratically enough deep inside him, a ticking he can’t quell and can’t ignore. He does it now and it’s only after his skin pinches in a groove that he realizes he’s been going over his metal knuckles.

He opens his metal palm and closes it. Steve asks him sometimes, if he’d like something else and he’s never had an answer for him. He hates his arm and he doesn’t. It’s a physically ugly, viscerally repelling thing. His arm gives him strength and takes it away. He can crush a man’s skull while the plates recalibrate. The man would be dead before the plates finished settling. It’s a physical, visible reminder of what he is, what he was brought back from the dead to do. Sometimes Bucky wants to rip it from his shoulder, lay it at the feet of a church and sink to his knees, asking for penance. Other times, he stares at it, reliving his burden and why shouldn’t he? He doesn’t feel right, tearing off a piece of him, even if it is the ugliest, most violent part. In a sense, that’s what he deserves, he thinks.

He deserves to look in the mirror and see what mars him.

This isn’t helping or healthy thinking. His therapist told him that. That doesn’t stop him from thinking it, though.

Bucky doesn’t really know what he deserves, but maybe that’s a question for another time, when the ringing’s stopped in his head and his mind isn’t full of ghosts. He focuses on what the therapist told him instead.

“I think,” Bucky swallows, licking his lips, wetting them nervously. “There’s something.”

His therapist adjusts her glasses and smiles at him patiently. It makes him want to punch the window clear through.

“Something?” she prompts.

“That makes me—” Bucky stops. He feels embarrassed, the flush flooding his cheeks, heat crawling up his neck. “I want to do. There’s something I want to try.”

“Okay,” the therapist says. “Why don’t you try it?”

Bucky chews on his bottom lip. He thinks about a silk robe in his drawer of precious things. He thinks about three magazines kept carefully under his spare pillow.

“I don’t know,” Bucky hesitates. “If I’m supposed to. If men—if it’s normal.”

The therapist looks thoughtful at this. She leans forward, her elbows resting on her thighs.

“What is normal?”

“What?” Bucky blinks at her.

“You’re a former assassin. You were held captive, tortured and brainwashed for centuries.”

“Gee Miss, don’t sugar coat it any,” Bucky grins at her. Sometimes he gets like this, a flash of who he used to be and a rakish smile that feels bright and false on his lips.

“You lost everything you knew entire lifetimes ago, James,” the therapist says kindly. “You’re a supersoldier. Captain America is your—”

“Punk,” Bucky says, protectively. “He’s my punk.”

“Sure,” the therapist gives him a half smile. “You could kill me right now, without a second thought. Couldn’t you?”

Bucky frowns.

“You don’t,” the therapist says, assuringly. “I don’t think you would.”

“Okay.”

“The point is, nothing about this is normal. Nothing about you is normal, James.”

Bucky shifts in his seat, uncomfortably.

“Why do you think that’s a bad thing?” the therapist asks, curiously. “Why is normal what you’re after?”

“Because,” Bucky says, both harsh and abashed. “I’ve never been normal before.”

Maybe there’s more to unpack there, but Bucky grows tired and his hour ends.

She doesn’t touch him—knows not to—but she does open a jar of candy for him at the end of their session. There are suckers inside. Bucky’s learned he loves the lemon-flavored ones.

He takes one from the jar, pleased.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” the therapist says with a smile. “No one’s normal, James. I’m not, you’re not, Steve Rogers definitely isn’t. So maybe try to think of it a different way. Ask—are you hurting anyone? And if not, then why not do what you’d like to try?”

He’s thoughtful as he sucks on his lemon lollipop.

  
Bucky doesn’t think it would be hurting anyone. He takes the magazine Steve left for him and opens it, turns it to his favorite page. It’s a pin up girl wearing a silky corset, cinched right at the waist, her hair up in curls, eyelashes long, with red, red lips. She makes Bucky feel some kinda way, but it’s not because he wants to touch her. He doesn’t even want to be her.

What he likes is how soft she looks. She looks seductive, sure, but more than that. There’s a story in her eyes, a poem in the lines of her curves. He likes the way she looks and he wonders what it would feel like to look like that too—soft and whole.

He touches her red mouth and then raises his fingers to his mouth. He touches his lips, gently. His heart beats fast, erratic, in the side of his chest.

He closes the magazine and puts it back under his pillow. Set slightly askew, he gets up. He has to go to Steve’s room now. When he feels like this—unmoored, his feet moving under him—he has to go to Steve’s room. He can’t explain why, wouldn’t say anything if asked. It makes him feel steadier to be there, with Steve’s things, where Steve sleeps, and where Steve will come back to, even if Steve isn’t there right now.

  
He stops short in the doorway.

There’s a gift bag on Steve’s bed. It’s black and has grey tissue paper crinkled, showing from the top.

Bucky stares at it, not knowing who it’s for or what it is, but feeling drawn anyway. He’s always been curious and that doesn’t just go away because your brain is mashed potatoes.

Bucky drifts across the room and sits on Steve’s bed next to it. He swings his legs under him. He stretches his arms above his head. He looks around to see if there’s anything to clean.

He leans toward the gift bag and reaches in.

*

Steve has to run an errand with Sam that takes half the day. By the time they finish and circle back to Brooklyn, Steve’s tired and bored, but mostly he misses Bucky.

“Drinks?” Sam asks.

“Another time,” Steve smiles at Sam, grateful for the offer.

“Gotta get home to the wife?” Sam grins.

He doesn’t mean it maliciously of course. Steve’s never called Bucky his wife—he’s never put a term to what they are and he likely never will. Still, it makes him smile. He doesn’t care if Bucky wants to be his wife, his husband, his boyfriend, his roommate for whom he harbors very open and not at all secret feelings. The term doesn’t matter to him so much as the person. He’ll call Bucky whatever he wants so long as Bucky’s his.

“I don’t like to be away for too long,” Steve admits and wonders, briefly, if he sounds insane. He frowns, but Sam just gives him a kind smile.

“I get it,” he says. “You searched for him all that time and finally got him back. You didn’t think you would. That’s not easy to forget and it’s even harder to shake. I wouldn’t want to be away either.”

He’s a good man, Sam Wilson. Steve will never not be grateful for him.

“Another day,” Steve says and claps Sam on the shoulder. “My treat.”

“Oh boy,” Sam grins and claps a hand back. “Cap’s paying? No way in hell I’m saying no.”

  
Steve toes his shoes off at the door.

“Buck,” he calls softly, as always. “I’m home.”

Bucky doesn’t answer and Steve wonders if he’s sleeping again. Bucky’s sleep schedule is mostly inconsistent, but he generally likes sleeping in the later afternoon, those few hours before twilight. Steve’s come home more than once to find Bucky fast asleep in his bed. He’s never put into words how much it means to him, to have Bucky right where he left him. He tries to make up for it through his actions, though. He’ll rub Bucky’s shoulder until he opens his blue eyes. He’ll lean forward and kiss him, softly.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he’ll say then and only then.

Steve wonders if Bucky’s asleep on his bed today. He wonders, distantly, if Bucky found his present and if he’s tried it on. Steve doesn’t expect Bucky to show him or to even acknowledge it, but he hopes it was what Bucky wanted and, more importantly, that it’s what he needed.

He checks Bucky’s room to see if he’s there and finds it empty. Then he knocks lightly on his own door and pushes it open.

Steve expects Bucky to be asleep, same as the other days. What he doesn’t expect is for him to be sitting on the bed, stripped to his boxers, looking distraught, with lace in his hands.

“Buck?” Steve says quickly.

There’s grey tissue paper strewn on the bed, the black gift bag tipped over. There’s a small black bag open next to him, its contents spilled out—lipstick and mascara, powder and blush, eyeliner and brushes.

Bucky’s holding the corset and the boxer briefs, both black and resplendent in lace. It’s the closest Steve could find to what Bucky had left for him.

Bucky looks so distressed, so upset, that Steve’s heart plummets in his chest. He crosses the room in half a heartbeat, sinks to his knees in front of Bucky.

“Buck,” he says again. “What’s wrong? Is it not what you wanted? Did I misread you?”

Bucky doesn’t look at him, but Steve can tell he hasn’t dissociated. He’s taking deep breaths, his limbs trembling.

“Tell me what’s wrong, sweetheart,” Steve says, nearly distraught himself. “Let me help, please. I swear that’s all I was trying to do.”

Bucky shakes his head. Then, clutching the lace pile close to his chest, he looks up at Steve. He looks utterly crestfallen.

“I can’t,” he says, his voice wobbly. “I’ll ruin it.”

“Ruin it?” Steve asks, gently. “Ruin it how?”

“With my—shaking,” Bucky says. “And my plates. I’ll ruin it, Steve. Like I ruin everything.”

“That’s not true,” Steve says immediately. He reaches forward, his fingertips grazing Bucky’s cheek. “Hey, I got it for you. Is it what you need?”

Bucky looks uncertain.

“Is it what you want?”

Bucky swallows thickly. Then he nods.

“Okay,” Steve says softly, so softly. Then, leaning toward Bucky, fingers sliding down his trembling arms, “Can I help?”

Bucky hesitates.

“What if I don’t—” he says and swallows again. “What if I look ugly?”

“You couldn’t,” Steve says. He tugs one of Bucky’s hands free and kisses his fingertips. He slides it over and kisses his palm. “You haven’t been ugly a day in your goddamned life.”

That at least makes Bucky hiccough in amusement.

“Let me help you,” Steve insists again. “Can I help you?”

Bucky looks down at the hand clutching the lace, as though reluctant to let go. This is precious to him, Steve realizes. Maybe Bucky doesn’t, but Steve does. It’s precious to him, so it’ll be precious to Steve. That’s how it is with them.

“Okay,” Bucky says finally and lets go of the cloth.

Steve presses another kiss, this time to Bucky’s wrist, and gets up.

*

Bucky evens his breathing. It’s more difficult than he remembers it being, modulating his sharp intake, his exhale noisy and shaky even to his own ears. There’s a hard lump lodged in his throat and something heavier stuck in his chest. He feels an anvil pressed against him, the weight crushing his rib cage, not quickly, but slowly, in steady measures. Steve takes the lace from him and Bucky feels all of his reluctance surge to his fingertips. _This is mine_ , Bucky’s brain seems to tell him. _This was given to me._

He knows Steve is only taking it to help him, but he can’t quell that part of him that’s afraid he’s going to take it forever. He has decades of things being taken from him. Not once in over 70 years has he had something to call his own, not even when he had fluttered to the surface of the Asset, sliding through the cracks in programming to _want_.

That’s just on the surface anyway.

If Bucky can will himself one moment of lucidity, he would admit that’s not what’s making his limbs shake. The truth is, Steve takes the lace from him and Bucky feels something intangible slip from his fingertips.

“Do you need help?” Steve asks and Bucky’s attention snaps to. “With the boxers?”

Bucky’s brain is a can of baked beans, but even he can manage to put on a pair of goddamned boxers.

“Yeah,” he says.

Steve smiles at himself encouragingly and hands over the black lace boxers, keeping the corset in his hands.

Bucky loves the feeling of the lace between his flesh fingertips. He had spent an hour just moving his fingers over the material, nails catching on the soft cloth, the spaces in between cut outs. He marvels at it again, almost pressing it to his face until he remembers Steve’s watching him.

“Ah—” Steve says when Bucky slides his fingers into the waistband of his boxers and slides them down. Steve turns slightly pink and looks away, as though giving Bucky his privacy.

This almost makes Bucky laugh. He’s been stripped bare time and time again for HYDRA, agents he knew and agents he’d only just met staring at every inch of him. Bucky hasn’t known privacy in decades. He’s almost forgotten to be ashamed of his nakedness, other than the ugliness of it all. Anyway if there’s one person in the world Bucky doesn’t mind stripping naked for, it’s the one person currently avoiding his eyes.

That’s just as well, Bucky thinks. Steve doesn’t need to see a body like this.

He kicks away his nondescript, cotton boxers and carefully steps into the lace ones. Taking a breath, he tugs them up.

They slide up his thighs and settle comfortably into his narrow waist.

“Done?” Steve asks and turns back toward Bucky. He stops, suddenly, his mouth forming a slight o.

“Bad?” Bucky asks, self consciously.

He looks down and it’s incongruous with how nervous he feels, but he runs his hands over the lace again. It’s as soft on him as it was in his hands. Bucky smiles.

“Good,” Steve says. He sounds so awed that Bucky looks up at him, giving him a crooked smile that makes Steve’s eyes twinkle in return. “So good.”

“It’s soft,” Bucky mutters, obsessed.

“It’s Versace,” Steve grins.

“Fancy,” Bucky snorts and Steve’s grin widens.

“Only the best for my—”

“Robot, ex-assassin best friend?” Bucky says wryly and Steve rolls his eyes.

“Dumbass best guy.”

That makes Bucky laugh. It floats down through him and then he realizes he’s up on his toes for no reason. He feels lighter than he had a moment ago. He feels light enough to float away.

“Want to try?” Steve asks and Bucky looks up at the corset Steve’s still holding.

Bucky almost asks if it’s okay, if that’s going one too far, but he stops himself just before. Steve wouldn’t have bought it for him if he thought it was too weird. Too fucked up.

Still, Bucky scans Steve’s face, looking for a sign—any sign—of discomfort. Steve’s face is nothing but unrestrained support and adoration. Steve’s face is never anything but. Bucky’s heart flutters.

He nods.

“I’ll have to get close,” Steve says. He looks Bucky in the eyes, not breaking contact. “Closer than a foot. For at least a few minutes. Is that okay?”

Bucky takes in a breath. He doesn’t know, is the truth. He doesn’t know when his brain is going to scream, but he knows he desperately doesn’t want it to.

“Yes,” Bucky says anyway.

“Tell me if you need me to move away,” Steve says. “I’ll do it immediately.”

“Okay,” Bucky nods.

Steve gives him an encouraging smile. Bucky tenses as Steve moves closer. He can feel his brain start to whine the closer he gets, crossing over what space he’s managed to put between them in the first place. The whining gets higher the closer Steve gets, higher and higher, Bucky gritting his teeth—higher, and then—

It stops.

“Hi,” Steve smiles, right in front of him.

Bucky smiles back and kisses him.

“Oh,” Steve says happily. He holds up the corset. “There are hooks in the front and lace ups in the back.”

Steve helps him, just like he says he will.

“Turn around, would you?”

Bucky complies.

He sucks in a breath, his fists clenched nervously as Steve reaches around him.

“You’re doing great, Buck,” he murmurs softly. “Just through here, there you go.”

Bucky slips one arm through the strap meant for his arm and then carefully, so carefully, does it with his metal arm too.

Steve continues murmuring quietly, but Bucky tunes it out a little. He focuses on his breathing, on the way the silky lace and cloth feel against his rough skin. Steve handles him gently, hands on his shoulders as he turns him, as though he, Bucky, is precious cargo and it makes part of his brain light up, as though there’s something in there that isn’t a brambled tangle of half-signals and corroded wires.

Bucky tilts his head down to watch Steve work and he’s struck by what he sees—mesmerized by it. Steve sinks to his knees and Bucky sucks in a painful breath, his breathing and brainwaves going wonky at the sight of it. Steve works on the hooks at the bottom and slowly, so slow it almost drives Bucky out of his mind, threads the hooks through their catches, one at a time. Bucky’s so distracted—by the crest of that golden head, the long, golden eyelashes dusting the top of cheekbones sculpted delicately, as though from marble, the concentration and devotion in the slight furrow between golden brows—that he forgets, momentarily, to feel anything close to self conscious.

Steve works his way up skin that’s raised with scars he’s gotten in the most violent ways possible, but the whine in Bucky’s brain is silent and he’s focused on Steve’s long fingers, the way he does every hook carefully, as though catching Bucky’s skin and hurting it even more would be unbearable to him.

When Steve gets to the top, Bucky’s breath has been knocked out of him completely. He feels set adrift, the heaviness of his body as light as air. Steve caresses his cheek with one large, smooth hand and Bucky feels that point of contact as an anchor, the only thing holding him down. It’s resplendent. It’s luxurious.

Steve doesn’t kiss him and Bucky aches for him to do so.

“Turn for me,” Steve says again and Bucky, head full of cotton, does so.

When Bucky dissociates, his mind drifts away from the physicality of his body. He knows, distantly, that it’s still there, that his limbs are still solid, that his feet are on the ground, but it’s through a fog, knowledge he can only grasp as though sand sliding through his fingers. His breath catches and he doesn’t know how to come back to it; often he can’t, until he’s shaken by something else—a touch, a sound, maybe time running its course.

This is nothing like that. This is exquisitely, painfully, the absolute opposite.

Bucky’s hooked into the corset, the straps digging into the meat of his shoulders, the lace strips stretching across his sides. Bucky’s looked at corsets for men and they’re all heavy—buckles and leather and bone that look restrictive. Bucky doesn’t want to be restricted. He has difficulty breathing on a normal day.

What Steve finds is nothing like that. The corset Steve buys for him is black lace and the softest whisper of cloth, cut outs in the side so that Bucky’s skin peeks through. Bucky’s no fan of his skin, but there’s something about the way this curves, about the flashes of pale white in between black that makes him feel less wieldy than he is. The corset is intricate, it’s delicate. It makes Bucky, too, feel delicate.

Steve’s breath is on the back of his neck, which makes goosebumps raise up and down his arms. His heart speeds up, setting a pace he can’t quite catch, pulsing steadily under his collarbone. Steve doesn’t speak and the air around them settles in the quiet sounds of their existence—Bucky, barely breathing, and Steve, his own breath whisper soft, but louder.

Steve pulls at the strings at the back and Bucky feels the tug in the front. Again, it’s gentle, almost too gentle. Bucky feels like _screaming_ at Steve— _I am meant to be broken_ —but he doesn’t. His head spins and he thinks— _maybe I don’t have to be_.

“Too tight?” Steve murmurs and Bucky feels his voice on his skin.

He could melt from the softness of it, just sink away, flesh from bone.

“No,” Bucky says back. “A little more.”

Steve pulls the strings again and this time Bucky lets out a little breath when it gets to the perfect tightness. Steve begins tying the back then and Bucky feels the pressure on his ribs, on his chest. It’s not too light, but not too firm. It’s somewhere in the middle, binding him just enough to make him feel alive.

“There,” Steve says and Bucky feels drunk on his voice. Steve presses a kiss to the back of his neck and Bucky feels the gooseflesh raise again. “All done.”

  
It’s one thing being bound into a corset. It’s another to look at himself in it—to see whether reality has matched up to what he’s seen in his mind. Bucky doesn’t know if what he’ll see will repulse him. Maybe it will be him in lingerie, maybe it will be the scars, the hard, cruel lines clashing with the delicate cloth. Maybe he’ll see all of it and think, this is not what a monster should look like.

“I’m right here,” Steve says and squeezes his hand. “I’ll hold your hand through it.”

Steve always seems to read his mind, even when Bucky can’t parse what’s happening in it.

The thought comforts him. The hand warms him.

Bucky turns around and looks in the mirror.

*

Bucky lets Steve hand go and moves toward the mirror. Steve lets him.

Bucky crowds forward and Steve takes a step back. He wants to see the expression on Bucky’s face—he’s aching to see it. But this moment isn’t for Steve and he recognizes that. There are moments in life not meant for everyone and this is one of them. Steve turns away, his chest tight, a lump in his throat. His hands shake until he curls them into fists. His nails dig into the palms of his hands, indenting crescents into the flesh.

Steve hears Bucky’s breathing pick up. He’s aware of it the way he’s aware of his own breathing, the way he’s aware of Bucky’s mouth and his hands, the lines at the sides of his eyes, and the slope of his nose. Steve’s aware of Bucky in a way he isn’t aware of anything else and it lights up his nerves, his senses overwhelmed by every infinitesimal movement and sound Bucky makes.

Steve is going to go mad under the weight of his love.

“I’ll be back,” he tells Bucky, but he doesn’t think Bucky hears him.

That’s okay too. Steve has no desire to step on his moment. He just needs a moment for himself—a chance to breathe.

He slips out of the room, leaving Bucky to his reflection.

  
Steve gets a glass of water, drinks all of it in two swallows total.

He leans over the kitchen counter, the edges digging into his stomach. He balls up his fists and presses them into his eyes.

Steve has always been hungry for Bucky. This isn’t a new feeling. It’s a feeling he’s known for years, for decades, for as long as he’s known him, it seems. Bucky’s always been Steve’s compass, his due north. It doesn’t matter to him which Bucky he gets, it never has—Bucky could come to him in any iteration of himself, cast himself into as many pieces as he can manage, and Steve would still want him. He would ground himself into the earth to pick up as many shards of Bucky Barnes as he can.

He doesn’t know if it’s healthy and he doesn’t know if it’s not. Sam tells him it makes sense, given what they’ve been through and maybe it does. Steve knows it doesn’t matter to him either way. He leaves the apartment with a sense of fear lodged in his sternum that doesn’t ease until he’s back home, until he sees Bucky again, waiting for him, in whatever state he wants to be.

Steve has burned earth, he’s scorched it, and he would do it again, wait as many years as Bucky needs, to find him again. That’s the kind of weight he carries, the shrapnel he digs into the core of his chest. It feels as light as a feather, even when his lungs are burning.

The truth is, Bucky Barnes is beautiful to him in every iteration of himself and he always has been. Steve knows this with the heart of him, but Bucky doesn’t. Steve doesn’t begrudge Bucky that—he couldn’t, not after what Bucky’s been through. But he wishes Bucky could see. He wishes he could crack his cavity open and hold his heart out to Bucky, the blood dripping over the sides of his fingers, and say _look. This is everything I have and it’s all for you._

Anyway, Bucky is beautiful to him. But Bucky carries himself the way a wounded cat might, or an animal that’s not used to the sun. He shies away from himself, as though he’s something to fear, and it breaks Steve’s heart to see it. This is different, though.

Steve had caught just a glimpse of it—the expression on Bucky’s face—and he thinks it’s the only thing that’s ever healed him. To watch Bucky’s demeanor melt into something softer, as though he’s learned to be kind to himself for the first time in decades—this, Steve almost cannot bear.

He puts the glass away and straightens himself, shakily.

His head is a scrambled, thorny, complicated mess. It’s funny that Bucky thinks he has the monopoly on that.

Steve gets himself together, walks down the hall, and opens the door again.

  
Bucky’s sitting at the dressing table. Steve sees the bag of make up in front of him now, the different compacts and tubes sitting out on the dark wooden top. He has a soft pink lipstick open, the color bright against all of the black he’s wearing. His hand is shaking. He turns to Steve and Steve can see that he’s tried to put it on, but the lines aren’t clean. He’s shaking and the pink is a little everywhere; it’s all a bit of a mess. Steve can see immediately that it’s hurting him, so he steps forward, squats to his knees to look back up at him again.

“I love that color on you,” he says, with a smile.

Bucky’s mouth is turned down into a frown.

“Hey, sunshine,” Steve says. “Turn that frown upside down.”

That almost does it.

“Stupid,” Bucky says and Steve laughs. “Can you—”

Steve waits until Bucky grinds out a breath.

“Can you help me?” Bucky asks. He goes a little cross-eyed in the process. It makes Steve unbearably fond.

“You just gotta say the word,” Steve says, and takes the lipstick from him.

*

Steve is on his knees again in front of him so that they’re level, Bucky turned away from the mirror and toward him, Steve with a hand on his shoulder and the other at his mouth. Bucky feels fuzzy around the edges, as though he’s been rubbed away, but the touch grounds him, a single point of contact bringing him back into his body. Steve’s thumb rubs against the rouge he’s already tried to put on.

It had been a stupid idea. He had already been so overwhelmed, so shaken by his reflection that his plates were shifting rapidly, his body trembling out of nerves. He had thought he could do it, but that had been a mistake. There’s pink smeared on his lips, but around them too. It’s ugly.

Steve doesn’t say anything, though. That’s the thing about him. Bucky can read Steve ten ways to Sunday, but he doesn’t say anything quietly or out loud. He looks at Bucky as though he’s never seen anyone better and that makes Bucky feel queer, because he doesn’t know if he’s earned half as much grace.

Anyway, Steve’s thumb brushes against Bucky’s mouth and the pink transfers onto his fingers, making a mess of everything. His mouth tingles where it’s been touched and he watches the lipstick-stained fingers, mesmerized. Suddenly he has the urge to lean forward, to look Steve in the eyes and take them into his mouth, lick the color clean. It makes him feel dizzy, almost heady, but he doesn’t have time to process the breadth of it before Steve’s wiping his fingers on a tissue and picking the tube of lipstick back up.

“I asked Natasha,” Steve says quietly. “I didn’t say who it was for.”

“What?” Bucky blinks.

“I don’t know the first thing about make up,” Steve says, sounding amused. “I didn’t know what colors you liked or what suited you. She said, whoever you’re buying for, think about what you’d like on their mouth.”

“That’s a weird comment,” Bucky says.

Steve laughs.

“I guess it was a weird request,” he says. “Anyway, that’s what I did.”

Bucky pauses.

“You wanted me in pink?”

“Your mouth is already pink, Buck,” Steve says. The way he stares into Bucky’s eyes electrifies him. “This seemed like it would...be similar. But brighter.”

“You looking at my mouth, Rogers?” Bucky asks, a little shyly, with a grin he can’t quite hide and Steve’s hand left hand curls over the edge of his jaw.

“Every day.”

“You like what you see?” Bucky says. He feels effervescent, like his blood has turned to carbonation, little bubbles fizzing up and down his spine.

“Do you?” Steve asks.

Bucky swallows. He feels the bone of the corset against his ribs, the lace against his sides. He looks down at his thighs, bare, except for the black lace from the boxers covering just a few inches.

He looks back up at Steve, nervous, as though asking for permission. Steve doesn’t give it to him. Then again, maybe it’s not his permission to give.

Slowly, Bucky nods.

Steve’s face melts into something so close to sunshine that Bucky almost covers his eyes.

“Me too,” Steve says and his hand finds Bucky’s, squeezes their fingers together. Then he sets it on Bucky’s shoulder. “Okay, hold still.”

Bucky doesn’t move.

Steve leans forward to get a better angle and Bucky keeps his mouth closed until Steve gently thumbs his lips apart, the gap making it easier for him to swipe the lipstick across. It’s a light pink, matte, so it glides across easily. The extra layer feels strange on his mouth at first, but it’s not so heavy that he feels uncomfortable. Steve does his bottom lip first, one swipe across, leaning back, and then going back to fill in what he’s missed. He smiles at Bucky encouragingly and Bucky forgets to breathe as he goes back in for the top.

“There,” Steve says when he’s done and Bucky takes a breath. “I think you have to smack your lips together, to...blend it?”

It’s funny to listen to Steve try something so far out of his depth, but Bucky’s too nervous to laugh. He does as he’s told and he knows that Steve’s right. The lipstick feels better after, smoother on his mouth.

“How does it look?” Bucky asks.

Steve doesn’t say anything to that, but Bucky can read him anyway. His eyes dip down to Bucky’s mouth and back up to catch his eyes. Steve’s fingertips graze his jaw again and Bucky’s chest feels light, his heart beating rapidly, a rat-a-tat-tat he can almost hear in his head. Steve’s eyes flicker back down and Bucky closes his eyes when he kisses him this time.

Steve kisses him softly at first, as though testing what it might feel like to fit their lips together. Then his fingers dig in just a little harder, the pressure on Bucky’s mouth firmer. Bucky lets his mouth fall open, just a little, and Steve swipes his tongue lightly against Bucky’s bottom lip. He kisses Bucky like he’s trying to kiss the lipstick right off his mouth and in fact, when he pulls back, eyes a little darker, breathing a little harder, his mouth is as pink as Bucky’s must be.

“If you wanted to use my lipstick, all you had to do was ask,” Bucky says wryly, as though his neck isn’t warm with blush, and Steve laughs.

When Steve laughs like this, breathless and warm, he sounds punch drunk, like his lungs are heavy, saturated with love. Bucky can’t get used to the sound, but he can’t get enough of it either. He almost chases after Steve again, wanting to kiss him, hungry for it even, but Steve leans forward again and thumbs away the places he smeared the lipstick with his greedy kisses.

“Couldn’t help myself,” Steve says, with a smile. “Had to see what it was like.”

“It was okay?” Bucky asks.

“It was more than okay,” Steve says.

Bucky’s heart continues to flutter as Steve reapplies the lipstick to his mouth. This time, he doesn’t have to ask Bucky to smack his lips together.

  
“I kinda don’t think your eyelashes need it,” Steve says, amused. He has the tube of mascara in his hand and he’s looking at the wand as though it’s from Asgard. To be fair, Bucky had been confused too, before he had watched a hundred hours of make up tutorials on YouTube.

“I just want to see,” Bucky says, feeling like he’s grinding his words out again.

“You’re gonna be the death of me,” Steve says, although it doesn’t sound like he minds at all.

Eyes are tricky and Bucky doesn’t know how he’s going to react, but he manages to stay still as Steve leans back in again, carefully—very carefully, rolling the wand against Bucky’s eyelashes. His breathing is as shallow as Bucky’s and maybe that’s why he doesn’t short circuit. It’s hard to malfunction when he’s trying to match his breathing to Steve’s and is distracted by the warmth he feels rolling off of him in the process.

“That looks good,” Steve says as he finishes one eye. He sounds proud, although Bucky thinks he might just be relieved he managed to figure out how to use the wand. “The other one.”

Bucky holds still and Steve does his right eye too, so slow he’s nearly lulled to sleep by the soft movement.

“Done,” Steve says, tugging him from his reverie. “How does it feel?”

“Everything is...heavy,” Bucky says, assessing how he feels.

“In a bad way?”

“No,” Bucky decides. He takes the mascara from Steve and puts it back in the little black bag. Then he reaches for the compact of blush and one of the brushes. “Across my cheekbones.”

Steve smiles at that, as though he’s delighted to be told what to do. It makes Bucky feel good too, which he files away to think about later.

“Remind me never to complain about how long it takes Natasha to get ready again,” Steve says as he dips the brush into the blush and begins spreading it across Bucky’s cheekbones.

Bucky doubts Steve’s technique is as good as the ones on YouTube, but he likes the feel of the brush sweeping down his cheeks. He can’t see the pink yet, but he can feel it on top, as though blossoming from his pale skin.

“We didn’t even put on foundation,” Bucky murmurs.

“What’s foundation?” Steve, ever the confused and well-meaning idiot, blinks.

Bucky smiles.

“I’ll tell you later.”

Bucky likes that—knowing something Steve doesn’t. Steve is always helping him and he likes the idea that he has something to share back, even if it isn’t something Steve would otherwise need to know.

“Okay,” Steve says, after a few more moments. “All done.”

Bucky sits there quietly, his hands in his lap, unwilling or unable, to look up.

“What’s wrong?” Steve asks. He leans forward to touch Bucky, almost unconsciously, but stops himself just in time.

Bucky’s heart rate spikes. He’s grateful for the distance and hates it at the same time. He’s so nervous he suddenly can’t think straight.

“What was he like?” Bucky asks. He’s surprised to find his voice shaking. By his expression, so is Steve.

“Who, Buck?”

“Him,” Bucky says. “James. Bucky. Me, then.”

Steve is quiet. Bucky feels like his throat is closing.

“What about him?”

“Was he—” Bucky tries. He stops and starts again. “Like this. Did he ever.”

The thing is, Bucky can read Steve ten ways to Sunday, but it goes both ways. Steve can read him too, which is why understanding flickers across his face.

“Not that I knew,” Steve says. “Not that you—he, ever told me. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t or didn’t want to. He—you were masculine, but well-kept. Confident, the most confident guy I ever knew.”

Bucky looks as miserable as he feels.

“Never a curl out of place. You used so much pomade I thought maybe they were paying you in it instead of money,” Steve smiles. “You liked dressing nice and you looked good when you did. Always crisp lines and new clothes if you could help it, or old clothes that you made look new. Your shoes—you always kept them so shiny. I could see my reflection in it.”

Bucky frowns and Steve shifts where he’s squatting. God, his legs must be killing him, but he doesn’t complain.

“You want to know what I think?”

Bucky nods.

“I think you’ve always been someone who’s explored himself through how he looks,” Steve says. “Me? I’m not like that. You give me a pair of jeans and a shirt and I’ll put it on and wear it for a week. I was like that then too. I had two pairs of pants, one regular shirt, one dress shirt, and a pair of suspenders that were one size too big on me. That’s never how I expressed myself. But you’re different, Buck. You were different then, so why wouldn’t you be different now?”

“I don’t want to—” Bucky says. He feels silly and embarrassed. He doesn’t know how to finish his sentence.

“There was nothing wrong with you then and there’s nothing wrong with you now.” Steve’s voice is firm, almost fierce.

He holds a hand out to Bucky, palm up, and Bucky stares at it before putting his hand on top. Steve laces his fingers through, curls their hands together.

“That Bucky wore what made him feel handsome and you should wear what makes you feel the same way. It doesn’t matter to me what that is. Do you understand that?”

Bucky doesn’t know. He’s a semi-functional cyborg who’s just trying to find one corner of humanity left to him. He shakes his head. Then he nods. He feels so confused his chest is boiling with it.

Steve gets to his feet finally, but doesn’t let go of Bucky’s hand.

“Come on, Buck,” Steve says, softly. “I’m right here with you.”

Bucky is afraid. It takes him the comfort of Steve’s hand and the bright blue of his eyes to admit it. He’s looking for a part of himself he doesn’t know still exists and to look at his reflection and find it gone is almost more than he thinks he can bear. He doesn’t remember who he used to be and he doesn’t know what he is now. He looks at Steve and it makes him think he’s a half-human with possibilities, but that seems too kind for what he should be allowed.

He’s killed so many people his skin is flecked with blood. It’s in his cells, under his nails. When he sees his reflection, he sees the eyes of a murderer, the mouth of one, the face and shape of one. Maybe that’s why he can’t look. He pins his redemption on a reflection that refuses to forgive him. He’s afraid—not to look and like what he sees, but to look and find that it’s changed nothing.

He thinks: why should he be forgiven?

But he also thinks: why should he be the only one who isn’t?

Steve tugs him up, gently, and Bucky lets him this time.

“I’m right here with you,” Steve says, brushing his hair back. He kisses him on the mouth, once, but doesn’t mess up his make up this time. It’s a soft press of mouth against mouth, as though Steve is willing his confidence over to Bucky physically, for lack of any other way to do it.

One day, Bucky thinks, he will repay Steve for everything he has ever done for him.

For today, he lets Steve touch his face.

He lets him touch his shoulders.

He lets Steve turn him around.

  
When Bucky was the Asset, he was taught two things: first, that he was not his own person, and second, that he was not a person at all.

He spent decades with that knowledge under his skin, the cold reality of it shocked back into his system every time he emerged from it. It’s difficult to break brainwashing; it’s even more difficult to take words that have been internalized, to unearth skeletons that exist in the heart of the body.

He has to take a hammer to the mirror, a shovel to his chest and dig out every part of him that HYDRA touched. It isn’t easy to do. To take who he was and who he is and who he wants to be and somehow make all of those disparate, broken pieces into a whole.

But nothing worth having ever comes easy. Or, at least, everything worth keeping is also worth fighting for. Steve taught him that. Steve teaches him that every day.

Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand and then lets go.

Maybe it’s time he starts fighting for himself.

He takes a breath and looks in the mirror.

  
Bucky has seen nothing but bloodstained hands and the shadows of ghosts in his reflection for as long as he can remember. He can’t remember very much, but that’s beside the point. He doesn’t like mirrors because they show him what he does not wish to see; he can’t hide from his reflection any more than he can hide from the cold weight of his metal arm or the raised skin of the scars carving up his body. When Bucky looks in the mirror, his head fills with the kind of static that’s difficult to escape from; a brain of pins and needles, invasive thoughts and unkind memories pricking at his conscience until they draw blood.

It’s no less than he deserves, but it doesn’t make it any easier, every time he looks in a mirror and sees the Asset staring back.

When Steve turns him around, he shakes, afraid for a brief, bright moment that none of it will have made any difference; that he will look for humanity and still find a monster in return. But Steve stands by him and he is reminded that Steve is brave every day. So for him, Bucky can be brave too; he thinks, he will never earn any grace by being a coward.

Bucky looks up and meets his own eyes.

It’s not the eyes of a monster and that surprises him. He sucks in a breath and, trembling slightly, looks at the rest of him.

What Bucky sees is not the hard, cruel lines of an assassin, the blood crusted under nails, the scars ripping his skin open and knitting over in ugly patterns across the surface. He doesn’t see the sharp jut of ribs or the open-mouthed ghosts of the people he will never earn forgiveness from. When Bucky looks in the mirror, he sees a human man, with brown hair curling over bare shoulders and a bright pink mouth slightly smudged just below cheeks swiped with a soft pink. He sees someone with a narrow waist, a frame that isn’t delicate, but could be, lace cut outs pressing softly against skin that is a pale contrast to the soft, dark material.

Bucky is not made for lingerie, but he wears it as though he could be; as though with this, he can take decades of skeletons and dust the bones from his ledger. He sees the soft jut of his collarbones and the slope of his sides, pulled in just enough to give him a gentler shape than he would otherwise have. He sees the lace of the boxers, reaching down just to the top of his thighs, the front protruding a little where he’s tucked inside. He thinks it should be ugly—the contrast of his thick thighs and the dark hair scattered across them and the intricate lace—but even to him it doesn’t appear that way.

Even to him, it looks, if Bucky were to put a word to it—beautiful.

He looks beautiful.

Bucky starts crying.

  
Bucky hasn’t cried; not in years, nor in lifetimes. It catches him with his defenses down now, his mouth slightly open, a soft snare untangling in the hollow of his chest with a snick only he can hear. It’s a heat at the top of his rib cage, crawling up his throat until it catches at the back, a thick, heavy feeling that he can’t so much swallow as he chokes on. He’s not devastated and that’s the most terrible thing of all, to cry when nothing has gone wrong.

He feels his face, warm and wet and he knows he’s ruining this too, ruining all of the thought and care Steve put into making up him up, but he starts crying for the first time in decades and he finds he can’t stop. It seeps out of him, as though his body is rejecting it; years of abuse and self-loathing, his body purging him of the poison HYDRA had fed him, the lies he had lived off of until he had been too afraid to face himself, in any reflection or in any capacity.

Bucky feels unmoored then, the ground shifting away beneath him and he would sink through all together, simply float adrift until time caught up to him, except for Steve; but for Steve, who has always been his one and only saving grace.

Steve touches his face, his fingers wiping away Bucky’s tears and Bucky can’t hear him over the sound of his own breaths, his heavy, deep sobs, pulled from the very gut of him, but he thinks he can see the words that Steve mouths—the _I love you_ s and the _you look beautiful_ s and once, just once, _this is everything you’ve ever deserved._

  
He stops crying, eventually, perhaps another lifetime later and when he does, he has to laugh, because he looks at his reflection and his make up is smeared, his mascara running, and he thinks he looks ugly again, but he’s never felt freer.

Bucky sways where he stands and when Steve holds a hand to his side, steadying him, Bucky’s brain doesn’t even put up a fight. He leans into Steve’s touch then and then, delighted by the permission of it all—from his brain, from his own goddamn body—he turns in Steve’s arms and for the first time in as long as he can remember, or maybe for the first time in his life—in this life, in the one left to him—Bucky Barnes wraps his arms around Steve and tucks his face into his neck.

*

Steve breathes in the scent of him, something clean and fresh, like lemons and baby powder, his nose tucked into the top of Bucky’s hair, the soft strands brushing against Steve’s cheek like silk against skin. Bucky holds onto Steve, willingly, without screaming, for the first time in this lifetime—in this one given back to them—and Bucky might be the one crying, but Steve’s the one who feels himself shake, a tremble that starts in a ravine in the Alps 70 some years ago, when Steve lets his best friend slip through his fingertips.

He spends years of his life searching for him and he’ll spend a lifetime more making it up to Bucky; showing him how much he’s owed and how much he’s loved and if at the end of the day, it’s nothing more than this—than Bucky holding onto Steve when he needs to be—then that is all Steve will ever ask of or take from him.

Bucky shifts in his arms and Steve feels the weight of him and the weight of them and if touch is Bucky’s redemption, then it is nothing short of Steve’s own salvation. He touches Bucky’s side then, smooth skin and tough, raised ridges pressing through lace as soft as velvet and Steve waits to see if Bucky will push him away before pressing a hand firmer to what skin he finds there.

His stomach tumbles when Bucky doesn’t move and when he reaches with his other hand to the small of Bucky’s back, to press his fingertips into the skin peeking under the edge of the corset and above the lace of the boxers, Bucky makes a noise so soft it sounds as though it’s been punched out of him.

Still Bucky doesn’t move, and Steve feels the curves of him against him—the hard edges and stiff lines and the soft shape of Bucky under a corset that makes him appear as delicate as lace itself.

Steve can control his hunger on the best of days and certainly on the worst, but it’s difficult now, with Bucky in his arms, his face tucked into Steve’s collarbone and his arms circled tightly around Steve’s back. It’s not that Steve wants anything Bucky is willing or unwilling to give him. If it was that simple, it could be ignored as a fleeting fancy; something shallow to be swallowed. What he feels is something that reaches into the chasm of him, a need to make his best friend happy; a need to make Bucky feel as beautiful and wanted as he truly is.

So Steve, swallows three years of hunger and decades of yearning, presses a kiss to the crown of Bucky’s head and, quietly, so quietly he thinks Bucky might not hear him at all, he asks, “Buck? Can I—will you let me get you off?”

*

Bucky’s head aches. His body feels sensitive, as though years of deprivation have suddenly found its home in him. Steve, warm against his body, his hands pressed to Bucky’s skin, as though he doesn’t mind the scars that he finds there, has Bucky’s breath coming out shorter, his mind sharp with hypersensitivity.

Still, even here, he remembers only one thing; the last thought he holds onto when he feels his pan fried brain short circuiting.

 _It’s a good reason, James,_ his therapist tells him. _It’s human to want to feel good._

Bucky, touch-starved, and searching for humanity can, at least, admit this to himself: that he wants to feel human and that Steve, touching him, would make him feel good.

“Yes,” Bucky rasps, his mouth forming the word before his brain fully catches up.

Steve stills and for a moment Bucky’s brain begins its high pitched whine, its scream of recalibration, thinking he’s ruined this, thinking this is wrong, thinking this isn’t what Steve wanted at all, thinking—

Except Steve lets out a breath so soft, it’s like Bucky can feel the relief sink through his body and into Bucky’s skin.

Steve moves his right hand, skimming the slightly exposed skin at Bucky’s hip and Bucky hisses at the sensation, burrowing his face even deeper into Steve’s shoulder, as Steve’s fingers slip past the top of the lace and down the soft, downy hair of Bucky’s stomach.

Bucky doesn’t realize he’s already half-hard until Steve’s finger grazes the tip of him and he lets out a sound he can’t quite help, plaintive and earnest in the same, soft breath.

“Oh, Buck,” Steve murmurs into his hair and Bucky doesn’t want Steve to see him or know him, but he doesn’t want Steve to move away or stop touching him either. He grinds into him, his body so unused to being allowed movement in exchange for touch and Steve runs his other hand over Bucky’s hip, soothing him.

That only makes it worse, Steve’s one hand on his skin and his other stroking Bucky’s cock, Bucky caught in the middle, his brain like spaghetti and his body poised on cotton balls and sharp pins.

Steve strokes him and murmurs soft affirmations into Bucky’s temple that Bucky only half-hears, so distracted is he by how his body, overwhelmed and hypersensitive, is reacting to the touch. He’s hard quicker than imaginable and his breath keeps puckering out of him as he presses his forehead so hard into Steve’s shoulder that it would bruise any man not fortified by superstrength.

As it is, Steve encourages him, and it’s only when Bucky feels like he’s going to lose what little control he has left, that Steve’s movement rustles the lace nestled against his skin. His brain immediately veers right, the elastic digging into his hips, and suddenly he’s distressed, so terribly distressed, he makes an agitated noise and shoves back from Steve. Steve freezes and the worry that crests his face is sharp and awful and Bucky would scream if he could get his brain to cobble together half a sound.

“Buck?” Steve asks instead, immediately concerned. “Are you okay? Was that too much?”

Bucky shakes his head, his teeth chattering, like it does when he’s trying to talk and his brain is being too loud to allow him.

“Talk to me, sweetheart,” Steve says, nearly begging.

Bucky feels like crying all over again because all he really wants is for Steve to continue touching him, but the only thing he can think about, now that his mind has reminded him is that—

“It’ll get ruined.” The words form with some difficulty and spill out easily. “I don’t want it to—they’re.”

He looks as stricken as he feels, words half-formed in his mouth, everything hard earned and rocks grit between his teeth, and maybe that’s why Steve softens, his worry fading to something more understanding.

“You gave them,” Bucky tries, through gritted teeth. “To me. I don’t want to. They—”

He swallows, struggling to find the word, to put phrases to the ringing in his head, and anyone else, literally anyone else, would give him up for lost then, and he wouldn’t blame them, they _should_ —but Steve’s expression just softens further, as though Bucky’s a puzzle he’s figured out lifetimes before. He crowds close to Bucky, cautiously—just an inch—and takes his face between his large hands.

“You don’t want to get them dirty, right?” Steve asks.

It sounds silly when Steve puts it like that, but he’s smiling, as though it’s not silly at all.

Bucky, throat burning, nods.

“Can I help you out of them, then?” Steve says, softly.

Bucky shakes his head, surprised and overwhelmed.

Then he nods.

*

Steve turns Bucky around so that he’s facing the mirror. Bucky tries to hide his face, shy at the attention, and undoubtedly a little embarrassed by his outburst, but Steve presses a kiss to his bare shoulder and then to the back of his neck and by the time he noses the little hairs just behind Bucky’s ear, Bucky’s expression has softened into something almost pleased. His cheeks color a little, just a brush of pink across the top, and it seems brighter under the blush that’s already swept across. He looks not demure, but gentle, graceful even, and it settles into that space under Steve’s rib cage where he keeps all of his hungry, selfish feelings for Bucky.

As it is, Bucky’s soft puff of a giggle makes Steve want to eat him alive, so he settles for one more kiss to his shoulder before he slips his arms around him and starts unhooking him from the corset.

Steve works slowly and watches himself unhook Bucky in the mirror, the corset falling away inch by inch and Bucky’s breathing coming in and out slowly, softly, barely a stir of air, the color on his cheeks rising higher, and the tent at the front of his lace boxers becoming more pronounced.

Even if Steve doesn’t get a chance to touch Bucky intimately again or finish the job, this is okay too. He doesn’t know, but he thinks—suspects—that it’s been a long time since Bucky’s felt anything as simple as pleasure. Bucky had never been shy about chasing it before and Steve thinks, if he can remind Bucky of this one thing—of how to love his body again, of how to love _in_ his body again, then it will have been worth it, every moment he’s wanted to press his fingertips to Bucky’s skin and refrained.

He reaches the bottom hook and it falls open at the front. Bucky, eyes wide and color quickly growing darker, watches Steve watch him in the mirror. Although he says nothing, Steve can feel the way his breathing picks up, sees the way his Adam’s apple bobs up and down quickly as he swallows. Steve hesitates only for a moment before he presses a thumb against the most prominent rope of a scar at Bucky’s side, something from a knife fight that had bitten into his ribs, and Bucky closes his eyes for a moment, as though in resignation, but then Steve slides his fingers over the scar, runs them up and down the line of it, of others, slowly, with a devotion he can’t quite hide.

He moves closer against Bucky’s back so Bucky can feel how much he wants him—of this, there can never be any doubt—and Bucky doesn’t stop that, just the same as he doesn’t stop Steve from worshipping his scars, the history bare laid across his best friend’s skin.

“Steve,” Bucky whines, breathlessly, only when it seems he cannot take a moment more of this, as drawn out and sensitive as he seems to have gotten.

It’s only then that Steve moves back and he helps Bucky carefully pull his arms out of the corset. He folds it carefully in half and walks over to the dresser to put it on top.

When he turns back around, Bucky is in front of him, hands greedily on Steve’s chest, fingers curling into the soft of Steve’s t-shirt, and Steve smiles, bright and wide, a smile brighter than the afternoon light between them.

Bucky reaches up and kisses him, his action hesitant, his mouth soft. He does this so rarely—initiate from his own—that it sweeps through Steve, crushing against his barriers. It shatters him inside and leaves him strewn like glass about Bucky’s feet.

Steve loops his arms around Bucky’s back and Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s shoulders, chest pressed against chest, and they kiss like that, breaths mingling between them, kisses so very full and feather soft, the taste cotton candy sweet.

“Steve,” Bucky says, more sternly this time and Steve laughs into the space between them, laughs into Bucky’s mouth until the corners tilt up into a smile and Bucky’s so bright in front of him, it’s the brightest and the lightest Steve has seen him since 19-goddamn-42.

That makes him dizzy, his entire body fuzzy with the warmth in his arms and the person who’s come to life— _finally_ come to life—before him.

“You got something to ask me, bud?” Steve replies, teasingly, because he loves it best when he can be an absolute shit to his best friend.

“You said,” Bucky says, very, very sternly. Steve smiles wider, can’t help but kiss him again at that. “Don’t try to distract me.”

“Now why would I do a thing like that?” Steve asks and kisses the corner of Bucky’s mouth and then the space under his lips and then the other corner, just to match.

“Because you’re—” Bucky tries to be serious, but his breath comes out in puffs and then Steve is pressing kisses to his jaws, just down the line of it, and Bucky looks like he’s short-circuiting, but in a wonderful way this time, “—a goddamn, good-for-nothing, fucking _punk_.”

Steve’s laughter rumbles against Bucky’s pulse point and he nips the skin there for good measure and the groan that the combination elicits means it’s time for Bucky’s prized versace boxers to come off.

“All right,” Steve says. “Let’s get you out of this lace.”

He hooks a thumb into either side and slides them down and when he’s on his knees, looking up at Bucky, he can see that Bucky’s gone dark and nearly cross-eyed at whatever he’s seeing.

Steve can only imagine, so he grins and presses a kiss to the inside of Bucky’s thigh and then works his way back up, slowly, pressing torturous kisses to his warm, sensitive skin that make Bucky go nearly boneless above him.

Steve catches him before he can actually tip over and he eases him back onto the bed and then, leaning down, and kisses him again—thoughtfully, deeply—he crawls over Bucky and gets a hand back where it matters.

*

Bucky hasn’t had sex that he can remember. He thinks—to the extent that he can think at all anymore—that the Asset must have fucked someone, once or twice. The Asset was let off its leash occasionally, when it amused HYDRA to do so, a monster and a dog leashed and then treated to a hint of freedom when it was good before being forced back on its collar. If the Asset was given any sort of leeway, it was hard and it was cold and it was a means to a very unsatisfying end.

Bucky doesn’t remember.

He doesn’t care to remember.

What he remembers is this: flinching at every touch, for over 70 years.

What he remembers is: cold hands and sharp nails, metal to his temple, metal to the soft skin of his sides to punish him, for every time he disobeyed, for every time he did not comply as asked.

Touch for Bucky is complicated, because touch for the Asset was bruising; impersonal; cruel.

But when Steve touches him, now, when his rough palm slides over the length of him, Bucky forgets, for the first time in 70 years, what that complication is.

  
Steve touches Bucky like he’s velvet under his fingertips; as though his body, as scarred and ugly as it is, is a body as close to divinity as Steve will ever get. His hands find every inch of Bucky’s skin, his touch careful and soft, until Bucky feels sparks running through his blood. He feels exposed under Steve’s gaze, softened under Steve’s mouth. Steve strokes him and Bucky feels a kind of absolution that he did not know could exist in the body left to him.

Bucky’s brain screams at him most days. It is a constant, daily noise, a shrieking, a churning, a grinding that he can not only hear, but _feel_ minute to minute, a shake that does not go away simply because he closes his eyes or refocuses on something else.

It takes him a moment—a breath, a single arch into Steve’s hand—to realize that his brain is quiet now. The silence is deafening to him, when he hears it. His shoulders tense and Steve kisses him again, one hand at his jaw and the other still pumping him. All he hears is the sound of his own breathing and the sound of Steve’s breathing, of their mouths moving together, and of the little sounds he hadn’t realized he had been making at all.

It feels luxurious, the silence.

It feels exquisite, like a breath allowed to him after years of holding it in.

He doesn’t realize he’s crying again until Steve is kissing away his tears, murmuring sweetly against his skin. _I love you_ , Steve says, in words and without, in the way Steve has been telling him now for two years and possibly, not that Bucky can remember, their whole lives.

Steve draws it out of him slowly, the gradual build in the pit of his stomach, his muscles tensing, his breath caught somewhere deep in his chest. There’s sweat dampening his brow and his heart racing, ticking up-up-up, and Bucky bucks up into Steve’s hand. Steve smiles then, whispers _I got you_ , into his mouth, and when Bucky finally comes, his brain whites out into an easy, cotton-soft peace that he hasn’t felt since he fell off a train, two lives ago.

  
He doesn’t know how long he exists in that space for; white and clean, his breath back in his body, his head quiet, his muscles loose and relaxed. At some point Steve moves, rustles the bed, and Bucky feels a warm, wet cloth pressed to his stomach. Steve rustles again and by the time Bucky can string together two thoughts again, he’s back in bed, his weight dipping the mattress next to him.

Bucky turns his head with an easy, dopey smile on his face and Steve is there watching him, like a creep, which is a thought that makes Bucky laugh and even though Steve doesn’t know a thing about what’s in the cottage cheese brain of a formidable ex-assassin, he laughs anyway.

Steve leans forward and kisses him, long and slow, like he has all the time in the day and even more time in the world.

“What about you?” Bucky asks, after a while, when his mouth is tingling and his body feels like salt water taffy.

“Another time,” Steve says, with a smile. “How are you feeling?”

Bucky doesn’t think, but he does stretch slightly, his muscles pulling in a way that leaves him almost punch drunk with pleasure.

“I liked that,” Bucky says. He feels his mouth curving up into a smile almost too good for his face. “I think I like...sex.”

That makes Steve laughs, maybe harder than it should, because he does that little snort laugh that he’s always done when he finds something too funny, and it makes him look like a loser, which is a thought that delights Bucky, because it’s rare that Captain America is a total loser.

Bucky kisses him as a reward and Steve’s laugh fades into a pleased sound.

“Are you okay with that?” Steve asks after Bucky pulls away.

“Okay with what?”

“Sex,” Steve says. “More of it.”

“Yeah,” Bucky replies, staring at Steve like he’s been replaced by an alien. Maybe he has been. He’s making no sense.

Steve tinges pink then and Bucky gets a flash to sometime before—a memory or a thought, or maybe a cryogenic dream—of fine blond hair and a fair flush across high cheekbones and porcelain white skin.

“With,” Steve says and then has to clear his throat. “With me?”

Bucky has heard Steve a lot of ways—compassionate and curious, relentless and angry, frustrated, commanding, daunting—but he’s never heard him like this. He’s not only hesitant, but he’s almost, well, shy.

“You see anyone else around here wanting to fuck a robot?” Bucky asks.

“That’s,” Steve starts and stops. He traces Bucky’s face with his eyes. “Anyone would wanna. Anyone with eyes. You’re—god, Buck. Jesus.”

Bucky wrinkles his nose, almost embarrassed, because he knows how he looks, he _knows_ , but the thing is, Steve is looking at him with saucer-wide, bright blue eyes, and he’s licking his lips, and he’s still flushed, and Bucky thinks—okay, his head is full of those little monkey dolls that play the cymbals, but even he’s not fucked up in the brain enough to mistake this.

Steve offers himself to Bucky as though _Bucky’s_ the prize and Steve’s just a consolation and not only is that wrong, the knowledge makes him feel ridiculous at the same time it warms him from toe to tip.

What Bucky likes is that Steve looks at him as though he could not get enough of him; as though even without make up and even without lingerie, he’s some great beauty—something fleeting and precious—that he could never hope to catch. The thing about someone like Steve looking at you like that is you start to believe it, even if you don’t understand why.

Bucky doesn’t love himself yet, but Steve loves him, and maybe, for him, right now, that’s one and the same.

Bucky presses a hand to Steve’s chest and leans forward, kissing him.

“Yeah, punk,” he says. “I wanna. With you.”

“Really?” Steve flushes brighter, but his face is brightening, like it always fucking goddamn does, whenever Bucky is within even inches of him.

“Gotta see what all that superserum did.” Bucky grins against his mouth. “All the places it went.”

Steve laughs at that, pink and embarrassed, but clearly so pleased he can hardly contain himself.

“I love you, Bucky,” Steve says, his smile tempering. His voice is soft, his hand on Bucky’s face. When he looks at Bucky like this—as though, Bucky is the only person in his world, as though, Bucky could be the world, the entire world, for someone like him, for someone like Steve Rogers—well, Bucky feels it then; every inch of him, every painful, aching, terrible inch of him, as human as they come.

He tests it out, first silently, the shape of the words in his mouth, and then, with a little more courage, out loud.

“Me too,” Bucky says, finally, quietly. “Love you too.”

Steve Rogers doesn’t really cry, but it almost looks like he’s going to, then. He cups Bucky’s face, his fingertips drifting down the line of his jaw, gently, almost preciously.

Steve comes closer and Bucky’s brain doesn’t say a thing.

He loops an arm around Bucky’s waist and Bucky curls into him, his head tucked under Steve’s chin.

“Did you love him too?” Bucky asks, after a moment of hesitation. A pause. “James. The other me.”

Steve takes a moment and Bucky can almost hear him swallow. He doesn’t mind. He thinks, he lost James, but so did Steve.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I’ve loved all the versions of you there ever have been.”

That makes Bucky both sad and happy. He thinks, maybe that’s just the way of the world.

“I love _you_ , Buck,” Steve says, empathically. “I’ll love whatever Bucky you are and whatever Bucky you want to be. I’ll make a home for him, for both of us, any way you’ll have it.”

That’s almost too much for one night. Bucky’s cried enough today. He has to save those tears for the next time he’s forced to experience a feeling.

He presses a kiss to Steve’s collarbone, his hand curled tight into his shirt.

“You’re too soft, Rogers,” he says and closes his eyes. “Gonna be the death of me.”

Steve, quiet and grateful, surrounds him with his solid warmth, a steady anchor to Bucky’s choppy waters.

Bucky feels the exhaustion pull at the edges of him, his consciousness retreating gently, like waves against the shore.

He feels Steve’s hand in his hair, a kiss on his brow, before his breathing evens out.

The last thing he remembers before falling asleep is this: being in Steve’s arms, in Steve’s bed, held close, without a foot of distance between them.

*

Steve comes home from a day light on missions and heavy on Tony Stark. That takes enough eye rolling and coming down from, but he leaves that weight at the door, not because Bucky couldn’t handle it—actually, he would be delighted to contribute a few eye rolls to the cause—but because he left before Bucky woke up this morning and leaving Bucky asleep in his own bed is something that has been a source of both delight and great grievance for him.

He had pressed a kiss to his forehead, smiling the entire time as he had gotten dressed, smiling, even, to the Tower, which was part of why Tony had been so very Tony about it all today.

Anyway, Steve feels an uptick of excitement in the square center of his chest, like a child on the morning of his birthday or someone standing in the middle of the street during the first snow of the year.

He takes his shoes off at the door, a smile already on his face.

“Buck?” he calls. “I’m home!”

He hears no answer, which dampens his spirits only a little. Thinking he might be napping, Steve hangs his coat and steps inside.

“You asleep?”

There’s no answer, so Steve goes to the kitchen first, gets a glass of water and drains it. He contemplates making a sandwich before he gets too hungry and then decides he’d much rather curl up next to Bucky in bed again, if he’ll let him.

The thought leaves a lingering smile on Steve’s face, the excitement still not tempered by the times they have done this now. Bucky doesn’t always want it and that’s okay, because it makes Steve appreciate the times he does all the more.

And it’s becoming more and more lately—the days his brain quiets outnumbering the days he can’t turn off the noise. Steve’s in no position to wonder or confirm if he’s a part of the valve for that, so he keeps asking Bucky if it’s okay and being delighted—overwhelmed, really—when he says yes.

He pads from the kitchen into the living room and is about to pass into the hallway to the bedroom when he sees the top of a familiar brown head.

Bucky, sitting on one side of the couch, his legs drawn up under him, a thick sweater with a large cowl neck snug against his body. He’s in sweatpants Steve recognizes as his own and has his hair tied back. He has headphones in and is bent over his phone, watching something and smiling.

Steve doesn’t mean to be a creep, but it catches him off guard, him standing in the kitchen doorway, just watching this—Bucky being here, Bucky being quiet and comfortable in a way Steve hasn’t seen any time this century and for some time before.

It, God, it catches the breath of him, almost knocks him straight off his feet.

He stands still, holding his center, watching, the smile on Bucky’s face widening, his expression slack, soft with what Steve thinks might be something close to peace.

He only gets another minute like this before Bucky suddenly looks up at him.

He says nothing for a moment, but his smile brightens, like the sun high on a winter’s day.

“Well?” Bucky says. “Are you just going to stand there?”

“That an invitation?” Steve grins.

Bucky takes just a moment and then opens his arms wide.

Feeling like every single holiday and every single special event in his life has come early, Steve lights up, just lights up from tip to tip, and shuffles over to the couch. He gets one knee on the couch and crawls over to Bucky until Bucky, laughing, encircles him with his arms.

“Hard day at work, honey?” Bucky asks and presses a little line of kisses at Steve’s hairline and Steve nearly melts at that, but he manages to hold onto Bucky instead.

“Yes,” Steve says, voice muffled into Bucky’s warm, soft, sweater-clad shoulder. “My coworkers talk too much.”

Bucky’s laugh rumbles through him and into Steve and Steve pushes his luck by pressing closer. Luckily, Bucky’s easy today, because he shifts them around so that Steve is more comfortably against him, Bucky’s arm tight around his back, Steve’s face tucked against his neck so that every time he breathes, it must tickle Bucky’s skin.

“You work too hard,” Bucky says. “Ever take a day off, pal?”

Steve smiles into Bucky’s throat and kisses the spot on top of his Adam’s apple.

“What would I do with that kinda time?”

Bucky hums around that and, after a moment, manhandles Steve so that he’s turned around, back to Bucky’s chest. Steve can feel Bucky’s warmth around him and it feels like a balm from his day, a home he hadn’t realized he had lost.

Bucky’s hand rests against his stomach and Steve covers it with his own. Bucky tenses and then relaxes, allowing it. He takes touches by inches now, a breath and a release. Steve will give him every inch he needs, just to be allowed one moment of closeness.

Luckily, Bucky gives him more than one moment these days. He’s started to give him all of them.

“We could...spend the day together,” Bucky says, slowly.

Steve tips his head back, grinning.

“And do what?”

“Watch TV,” Bucky says. “Spend time. With each other.”

“Yeah?” Steve’s grin widens. “Anything else?”

Bucky scowls at him. It makes him look so grumpy that Steve laughs out loud. It smooths out into a grin and then onto a soft smile, small and fond.

“We can do that too,” Steve says, warmly. “Anything you want. However many times you want.”

“I have some ideas…” Bucky says.

Steve’s heart skips a beat, or several.

“Yeah?”

Bucky, grinning wildly, taps his mouth with his finger.

It takes Steve just a moment to understand the gesture, but when he does it again, it catches him in the center of his chest, or below his rib cage, in all of the places he stores all of the feelings he has for this person, his person. He looks up at him through his eyelashes, at the smile spread across his face, loose and carefree and not a little smug, and whatever part of Steve worries—constantly, worries—that he’s not doing enough for Bucky, that he’s not there for him in all the ways he needs him to be or deserves for him to be, that Bucky will never know the extent of it, the affection and devotion he carries for him—well, that part quiets, just for this one moment in time.

Steve tilts his head back and leans up, kissing Bucky on the mouth once. When he pulls away, Bucky, scowling, dips his mouth down and kisses him again.

*

It’s not always a good day for Bucky, but sometimes it is. Often, it is. Lately, the good days, the whole days, are more than the bad ones, are greater, in number, than the sum of its parts.

Bucky’s mind might be the grey matter equivalent of Swiss cheese, but he knows why this is. His therapist doesn’t have to ask him what has made the difference or ask him to reflect on the changes that have been good for him. Bucky knows that there is one factor, one change, between the Asset, what he was, and Bucky Barnes—this Bucky Barnes.

He feels Steve’s heart beat through his back, into the warm spot just above his own chest. His own heart answers erratically and it’s a pleasure, to feel it; to be able to identify it.

This morning, after Steve had stepped out, he had stood in front of his mirror, with only his lavender silk robe on, leaving the rest of him bare. He doesn’t know what it’s like to love his body, not yet, but Steve is teaching him, one night at a time.

He had traced some of the scars on his skin that morning and thought: maybe it isn’t ugly, maybe it’s just his story to tell.

It’s a start.

He thinks, his therapist would definitely offer him a lollipop for that.

“Want to watch a movie?” Steve murmurs, shaking Bucky out of the daze of his head. “Then make dinner?”

Bucky takes stock of himself—his body, physically, his emotions, the whirring inside of his head. It’s calm today; he’s present. He’s happy. Having Steve here, having him pressed close, tethers him to reality when he threatens to break away.

The warmth spreads through his chest, through parts of him that have always needed warming, that have been cold for years and years, and he presses a kiss to Steve’s head. He delights in doing so. It’s usually Steve who’s giving him kisses, instead.

“Yes,” he says. “And then, we have sex.”

Steve, startled, laughs so hard that he starts coughing and then Bucky is scowling at him and growling into his shoulder and Steve twists around in his arms, grinning at him, that shit-eating grin on his face he gets when he’s being _clever_ or _thinks_ he’s being clever and Bucky withholds kisses from him _this_ time because Steve Rogers is a pain in the ass and neither Bucky nor the Asset will reward his bad behavior.

Well, it’s a thought that lasts for a few minutes anyway.

But then Steve’s face is pink and his eyes are very blue and Bucky is mesmerized by him—always, mesmerized—and he wants to press his fingers into the smooth skin of his cheeks and Bucky thinks, briefly, maybe he’s addicted to touching Steve now. Perhaps he’s addicted to kissing him.

Anyway, that’s not so bad as all of that.

Steve eventually stops laughing and Bucky eventually stops scowling and they tilt their mouths forward together and they kiss, because maybe they’re both addicted to kissing each other.

They settle back together against the couch, Steve leaning against him, carefully, and Bucky, carefully, tilting his forehead onto Steve’s shoulder.

He thinks, what was a foot is now inches; is less than that; is nothing at all.

“Thank you,” he mouths against Steve’s jaw, reaches for the remote, and presses play.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title from William Shakespeare's [Sonnet 55](http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/55.html). 
> 
> This fic was an absolute joy to write and I hope it was just as lovely to read. It can be reblogged, if the spirit moves you, on [Tumblr](https://spacerenegades.tumblr.com/post/189480714523/not-marble-nor-the-gilded-monuments-ao3by) or retweeted on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/spacerenegades/status/1202410001291268096?s=20). 
> 
> As ever, I love to hear from you and you can join me for absolute shenanigans at [@spacerenegades](https://twitter.com/spacerenegades) on Twitter! ♥

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Not Marble, nor the Gilded Monuments](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21760369) by [lightupstars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightupstars/pseuds/lightupstars)




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